China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Parasites and Conservation Biology
Published in Eric S. Loker, Bruce V. Hofkin, Parasitology, 2023
Eric S. Loker, Bruce V. Hofkin
De-extinction is the idea of using our increasing expertise in genomics, genome editing as with CRISPR/Cas, cloning and back-breeding to resurrect species now extinct. It is rendered more feasible by our increasing ability to stitch together near-complete genomes of ancient DNA from an increasing variety of sources such as frozen tissues, teeth and other bones, hides or museum specimens. It is generally considered with respect to charismatic species like wooly mammoths or the Australian thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus, a large marsupial carnivore. It might also someday involve characteristic parasites associated with formerly extinct hosts, such as stomach botflies from mammoths.
Late imperial epidemiology, part 2
Published in Vivienne Lo, Michael Stanley-Baker, Dolly Yang, Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022
As for material methods, historical records of epidemics created by Chinese administrators (from dynastic histories to local gazetteers and jottings), religious leaders (from tracts on doctrines to rituals and liturgy), and medical authorities (from treatises to case records) constituted the primary-source foundation for the former period. From the 1980s onwards, however, geneticists began to develop means to extract human and bacterial DNA (aDNA) from ancient remains, and so bring new evidence into the conversations about the global history of epidemics. The resulting new field of paleomicrobiology since the 1990s has analysed ancient DNA (aDNA) in ways that confirmed, for example, the retrospective diagnoses of a range of infectious diseases from tuberculosis in ancient Egypt to plague in fourteenth-century Europe and influenza in the US during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Furthermore, scientific research on the history of non-human diseases and even viruses has developed additional evidence that medical historians may both historicise and integrate into new global histories of disease in non-human as well as human populations.
The Rise and Fall of a Historical Plague Reservoir
Published in Lori Jones, Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, 2022
Recent studies confirm this historical claim, on the basis of evidence gathered by extracting and analysing ancient DNA (aDNA) fragments from human skeletal remains. For example, genetic evidence recovered from the victims of the Plague of Provence (1720–22) indicates that the bacterium that killed them descended directly from the lineage of Y. pestis involved in the Black Death. According to this research, “the strains responsible for the Black Death left descendants that persisted for several centuries in an as yet unidentified host reservoir population, accumulated genetic variation, and eventually contributed to the Great Plague of Marseille” (Bos et al. 2016, e12994). This finding supports the hypothesis that the infection was kept alive in (now extinct) plague reservoirs in or around western Europe and that it did repeatedly re-emerge even in the absence of new re-introductions from outside. This argument is also supported by historical research that indicates the absence of major plague outbreaks in the eastern Mediterranean region whence it is claimed to have been introduced (Varlık 2020b).
Paleogenomics of the prehistory of Europe: human migrations, domestication and disease
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2021
Javier G. Serrano, Alejandra C. Ordóñez, Rosa Fregel
Although older genomes are being sequenced with the refinement of NGS techniques, bad preservation conditions are still the weak spot of ancient DNA studies. This extends to both poor-preserved genomes from warm regions and older hominin genomes from the Pleistocene. For some archaeological samples, the recovery of ancient DNA is impossible due to extensive degradation. However, in the last decade, alongside NGS, tandem mass spectrometry of proteins has firmly positioned itself as a reliable source of molecular data from ancient hominins. Proteins, unlike DNA, can be preserved for millions of years in adverse environmental conditions. The enamel proteome is one of the preferred sources for protein evolution analysis, as it is the best preserved hard tissue in the mammalian skeleton (Cappellini et al. 2019, Welker et al. 2019; 2020). Using enamel, Welker et al. (2020) have recovered molecular information of a 1.7-million-year Homo erectus and a 0.9-million-year Homo antecessor. Using this data, they shed light on the long-standing debate about the origin of H. antecessor. With this proteomic information, it was possible to resolve the phylogeny of H. antecessor and later hominins, placing it as the possible common ancestor of H. sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.
Reconstruction of the human peopling of Europe: a genetic insight
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2021
David Caramelli, Cosimo Posth, Olga Rickards
The contribution by Serrano et al. (2021) provides a comprehensive overview of European Prehistory as became possible through the use of the latest next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques. The authors focus on main discoveries deriving from the analysis of human genome-wide data as well as non-human genetic data to better understand the demography of ancient European populations, from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age. Archaeological evidence has already shown a complex pattern of demic and/or cultural diffusion since the Upper Palaeolithic, which becomes more evident during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age transitions. The study of ancient DNA has been fundamental in understanding whether cultural changes occurred due to the migration of people or ideas and culture. Moreover, the analysis of ancient genomes of domestic animals and pathogens provides deeper insights into the processes that accompanied the peopling of Europe. This comprehensive approach has been crucial for answering questions related to the Neolithic Revolution, for example by showing that the spread of agriculture and herding techniques has largely been the result of people’s movement, despite being driven by cultural diffusion in some areas (Jones et al. 2017; Mittnik et al. 2018). Therefore, ancient whole-genome studies provide a transformative tool to characterise prehistoric events not previously identified and to challenge traditional hypotheses. If complemented with other molecular, chemical, and archaeological evidence, those studies will lead to a more realistic and comprehensive description of Europe’s past.
East Anglian early Neolithic monument burial linked to contemporary Megaliths
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2019
Christiana L. Scheib, Ruoyun Hui, Eugenia D’Atanasio, Anthony Wilder Wohns, Sarah A. Inskip, Alice Rose, Craig Cessford, Tamsin C. O’Connell, John E. Robb, Christopher Evans, Ricky Patten, Toomas Kivisild
Three individuals were sampled from the available skeletal elements with petrous bone preferred if available: Sk.2/801 (petrous bone), Sk.1/880 (tooth) and Sk.4/799 (tooth). Sk.3/800 lacked teeth and petrous bone and is likely the same individual as Sk.1/880, thus was not sampled at this time. Ancient DNA (aDNA) was successfully extracted in a dedicated facility (see Supplementary material) from the teeth while the extract from the petrous bone failed to amplify. Extracts were built into double-stranded, single-indexed libraries and were shotgun-sequenced on Illumina NextSeq500 using the single-end 75 base pair kit. For details on analysis pipelines and software, see Supplementary materials. Carbon and nitrogen isotopic values were measured on bone collagen extracted from the ribs of both Sk.4/799 and Sk.1/880, as well as the individual Sk.2/801, using continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometry (Table 2) (see Supplementary material).